See "folk economics" and Bryan Caplan's research for evidence of zero-sum bias. And Robert Wright's Non-Zero for a discussion of how human progress has come from increasingly positive-sum interactions.

This post feels a bit lacking as it just briefly introduces a bias and explains why it is there, but doesn't talk about how to overcome it or the harm that it does. Zero-sum bias results in tons of bad laws, for example. And it can be self-perpetuating - very high marginal tax rates are often justified by assuming the earner just got lucky or took from someone else. If those in the highest tax brackets are the most productive, then the disincentive caused by such punitive taxes is causing the most productive to work less - a huge cost.

Sure this applies to punishments in society, but for self-motivation it is the opposite. I want my self-motivation to be fun not punitive.

Please do! I would be very interested in a series on "use of chemicals to increase willpower". I would even contribute...

"To put it another way, irrationalists free-ride on the real-world material-comfort achievements of rationalists. "

This is way too rationality-centric. People who don't work a lot free-ride on the real-world material-comfort achievements of workaholics. People who are not creative or entrepreneurial free-ride on those who invent new products and services. There is a hell of a lot more to productivity and world accomplishments than rationality.

For example, a rational person might work much less than an irrational person who let their primitive desire to rise to the top of the tribe propel them into continuing to start new companies and increase their wealth after making their first billion, even though their second billion will make no actual difference to their standard of living. And thus that irrationally-driven billionaire might produce far more value for the world than the rationalist who quits after their first ten million to focus on consumption.

Your final paragraph is a very limited list of the ways parents can spend money on their children. For example, what if the choice is between spending more money on your current kids (like by signing them up for cryonics), and having more kids? By giving kid 1 immortality, you snuff out kid 2's chance at life. There are more life or not-life tradeoffs going on here than merely cryonics.

Anyway, there are a bunch of things mixed up in your (understandably) emotional paragraph. Like: what do parents owe their children? And: is cryonics a cost-effective benefit? Both of these links seem somewhat suspect to me.

I'm still a few million in net worth away from thinking cryonics is worth the cost.

"On average, nothing ever happens for the first time" is an erroneous characterization because it ignores all the times where the predictable thing kept on happening. By invoking the first time you restrict the reference class to those where something unusual happened. But if usually nothing unusual happens (hmm...) and those who predict the unusual are usually con artists as opposed to genius inside analyzers (is this really so unreasonable a view of history?), then he has a point.

"Smart people claiming that amazing things are going to happen" sometimes leads the way for things like the Wright Brothers, but very often nothing amazing happens.

Perhaps if the poll is shared by friends on Facebook, this becomes easy?

"Robin previously posted (and I commented) on the notion of trying to distinguish correct contrarians by "outside indicators" - as I would put it, trying to distinguish correct contrarians, not by analyzing the details of their arguments, but by zooming way out and seeing what sort of general excuse they give for disagreeing with the establishment. As I said in the comments, I am generally pessimistic about the chances of success for this project"

I think the method that was taught in my family is better: become an expert on one or more subjects, so that you can know, by evaluating the evidence, which views are correct. Then, judge sources by their accuracy in those areas on which you are expert.

The method was not explicitly meant for contrarianism, but it works well there. Research some promising contrarian claims (perhaps those like diet & exercise which will most affect your life) so that you have pretty high confidence in whether they are correct. Then evaluate the accuracy of contrarians based on whether their claims agree with your research in those areas, and upweight the other things that those contrarians believe. Sure, you have to be smart enough to be a good evidence evaluator, but, hey, that sounds like us.

"I've never heard of any surveys like this actually being done, but it sounds like quite an interesting dataset to have, if it could be obtained."

This would be a really fun dataset! See how many dimensions it reduces to and what the bases are.